BlackBerry service restored in Europe after hours-long outage

RIM has restored service to BlackBerry handsets affected by an early-morning outage that plagued devices in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The cause of the problem has yet to be disclosed to the public, but RIM says that it affected nearly 5 million of its users. The company has restored service, at least in Europe, and issued the following statement from CEO Thorsten Heins:

"We are conducting a full technical analysis of this quality of service issue and will report as soon as it concludes. I again want to apologize to those customers who were impacted today."

Today's service failure immediately brought up comparisons to a four-day outage in 2011 that left users across the globe unable to access messaging or email. The latest embarrassment was worsened by the coincidence that it happened on the same day as the release of a new Apple iPhone, which is largely responsible for BlackBerry losing its pole position among smartphone operating systems. While millions of iPhones were purchased across the world today, millions of BlackBerry users were unable to communicate on their devices.

The most recent outage was not as long as last year's, but it was yet another stain on BlackBerry's reputation as a reliable platform geared for communication. If RIM can't guarantee stable use of the one best-in-class feature it still has over Android and iOS, what will keep users around, especially in regions where it's market share has not been as damaged as it has been in the U.S.? RIM hopes that BlackBerry 10 will reestablish it as one of the top performing manufacturers, but it will also need to prevent more massive outages in order to placate existing BlackBerry users. RIM has spent the past year promoting its enterprise services business that now support non-BlackBerry devices as well, so the company will look to reassure businesses that it can deliver reliable service.